Sunday, June 24, 2012

Flood! (1976) & Fire! (1977)

After the success of his lavish
blockbusters The Poseidon Adventure
(1972) and The Towering Inferno
(1974), producer Irwin Allen tried to keep the disaster-movie momentum going,
but most of his subsequent flicks ended up getting made for television on pathetic
budgets. Therefore, it’s not surprising that Allen refused onscreen credit for
producing the first of these also-ran projects, Flood!—the exclaiming title of which promises more excitement than
the movie delivers.

A random gang of actors, most of whom were on their way
down the Hollywood ladder at the time, portray residents of a small town called
Brownsville, which gets submerged when the local dam succumbs to pressure after
heavy rainfall. Since the movie features an idiot politician who refuses to
acknowledge the potential for danger until it’s too late, calling Flood! trite would be giving the thing
too much credit. Furthermore, the special effects, normally Allen’s hallmark,
are laughable. One silly gimmick involves placing a container of water in front
of the camera, then shooting over the container toward a nearby building, as if
this bargain-basement illusion can persuade viewers they’re beholding a catastrophe
of Biblical proportions. Worst of all, the movie is dull and slow, despite the hearty
efforts of actors including Richard Basehart, Robert Culp, Barbara Hershey,
Martin Milner, Cameron Mitchell, and Poseidon
Adventure survivors Carol Lynley and Roddy McDowall.

Allen’s next TV
endeavor, for which he actually did take onscreen credit, nearly earns its
exclamation point. Fire! stars Poseidon Adventure veteran Ernest
Borgnine, whose campy acting style always enlivens silly movies, and the simplistic
plot gets the job done: When a convict on a labor crew working in a mountaintop
forest starts a fire to obscure his escape attempt, the conflagration spreads
toward a resort town, forcing guests and locals to flee. Meanwhile, easygoing local Sam
(Borgnine) sticks around to help with the evacuation because he’s in love with
the local hotelier (Vera Miles). The cast is unimpressive (Alex Cord, Patty
Duke, Erik Estrada, Donna Mills, Lloyd Nolan), but Allen and his director, Earl
Bellamy (who also helmed Flood!), get
the formula right in terms of meshing melodrama with nature-gone-wild tragedy.
It helps that the movie relies on practical effects, with real buildings and
trees burning on camera, rather than chintzy tricks. Fire! is terrible, of course, but it delivers the goods.

Clearly,
however, the bloom was off the rose, so even though Allen oversaw three
additional made-for-TV disaster flicks, they suffered ignoble fates. With
C-listers like Bert Convy starring, Allen’s production Hanging by a Thread, in which people flash back to their pasts while trapped in a cable car, aired to no acclaim as a two-night miniseries in
late 1979. Next, the self-explanatory The
Night the Bridge Fell Down was shot in 1979 but not broadcast until 1983. Then, after Allen’s final big-screen disaster movies, The
Swarm (1978) and When Time Ran Out .
. . (1980), the end of his cycle finally came with Cave-In, a long-winded TV movie about just what the title suggests,
which aired in 1983, shortly after The Night the Bridge Fell Down. (All made-for-television titles available at WarnerArchive.com)